The band composed of Butch Silverio on trumpet, Richie Quirino on drums, Aya Yuson on guitar, Deo Arellano on flute and vocals, Ron Harder on bass, and guest Prof. Nethercutt straight from the underwater city of New Orleans were in a zone, with a repertoire that ranged from samba and bossa nova, to improvised Dixieland a la Amazing Grace played in Louisiana funerals, from Marsalis to Metheny and De Johnette, the wave of jazz future flew over our heads and into our beers and tofu for a night of transcendental jamming that stretched well into morning.
Richie Q. for one made us eat our words that he had traded in his drumsticks for a writer’s tools, but from what we heard he has all but kicked the arthritis, and if this is semi-retired drumming I dread to think of how he would play at full blast. He’s miles away now from Destiny, the mid-’70s band he formed with Bob Aves and Gabe Ascalon that did an in-your-face instrumental version of A Taste of Honey.
Butch S., perhaps the last purveyor of local Dixieland, intermittently sends text messages on where his fledgling band Luzviminda would be playing, but so far we haven’t caught up with them, including Cooky Chua on lead vocals. We finally did catch the trumpet man with Jazzphil, his trumpet smoking as usual and shaking out the ghosts of double time past.
Ayahuesca Y. as may or may not be expected from a progeny of writers, continues to weave lyric tales on the fret-board, driving the band higher and higher to areas where no band has gone before. Alternately reflective and whimsical, Aya’s chords come tumbling down in augmented and sustained scales dancing in the periphery of the song structure.
Aguitar solo is usually thrummed back to terra firma with a bass run by Ron H., the hard one who together with Richie anchors the sound to the pier of arpeggios like an anchored angel, doing JG Villa one better.
Deo A.? He surprised us with his samba phrasing and mastery of a foreign language (must have been Portuguese), taking command of a tune like striker Cristiano Ronaldo would the offense for Manchester United. Even a standard such as Desafinado as interpreted by Jazzphil would win new adherents to the song.
Of course we couldn’t say enough about the professor, the baldheaded senior trombonist Nethercutt, whose instrument has inspired anyone from the makers of animated cartoons (fancy way to nudge those in the first row to attention), to the sultan of swing Glenn Miller whose A-train got lost on the way to station heaven.
Nethercutt led a heartfelt tribute to his all but swamped city of New Orleans, home of fabulous cuisine like gumbo, the French Quarter, and famous musicians like Fats Domino who never was found again after the flood, but whose music, through Jazzphil that transcends all borders, and the wonder of digital compact discs lives on.
I don’t think I have heard a more intimate version of Amazing Grace, the procession taking us to unexplored lands, and when the last strain faded we half expected maybe Rod Stewart’s raspy voice to sing the opening lines of Bob Dylan’s Tomorrow Is a Long Time: "If today were not an endless highway/If tonight were not a crooked trail..."
Could it have been a jazz super-group that we were watching with our jaded faded eyes, except that, excuse us, this one was unusual because all egos were subsumed; it was just a matter of letting jazz as played by musicians that have found common cause with the music, find its own level.
The rest as the say, is malt and hops and sashimi and cereal and hangover history, as well chord progressions that defy natural predictions and calamities, except for this bit of sad news a little birdie told me in the night: Wasabi jazz bar will be closed sometime this month, to give way to a more financially viable hip-hop rave dugout.
Not to worry, though, because Jazzphil president Sandra Lim has told us that they are in the midst of preparations for a jazz and ethnic arts festival early next year, and among those slated to play on three simultaneous stages from morning to midnight in a yet undetermined city are Airto Moreira and Flora Purim as well as the Yellowjackets.
Top this off with the annual Candid Jazz festival at the Podium in Ortigas, featuring the 18-year-old wunderkind Catherine Tuttle visiting from the land of disguised terrorists, and we have already the elements of a Cortazar story, and understand how being the pursuer is not so different from being the pursued.